Discourse analysis of newspaper headlines: a
methodological framework for research into national representations

by Christine Develotte and Elizabeth Rechniewski

Department of French Studies,
School of European, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Studies, University of Sydney, Australia

christine.develotte@french.usyd.edu.au and elizabeth.rechniewski@french.usyd.edu.au

The discussion of the
theoretical and methodological issues involved in the discourse analysis of
newspaper headlines which forms the basis of this research note, arises out of
a study comparing the Australian and French press at the time of the crisis in
Franco-Australian relations provoked by President Chirac's decision to
recommence nuclear testing in the South Pacific in June 1995. This study formed
part of a larger project: 'Xenophobia and xenophilia in Franco-Australian
relations', undertaken by researchers from France and Australia and coordinated
by Peter Cryle, University of Queensland, and Geneviève Zarate, ENS
Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, which examined the representations of the two nations in
a range of media over the months before, during and after the crisis. (1) To
undertake the study of the press, a corpus was constituted from coverage of the
crisis in both French and Australian daily papers.

One of the challenges posed
by study of the press is how to arrive at valid conclusions, given that the
time-consuming nature of discourse analysis makes it difficult to undertake the
detailed analysis of a large number of articles. We thus sought a method which
would allow us to gain an overview of an extensive corpus. The solution which
we arrived at, the study of headlines, offers a number of distinct advantages
which we outline in this article. A corpus of headlines facilitates quantitative
analysis, for example, a longitudinal study of the frequency of headlines on a
particular issue can reveal the evolution in the prominence given to a topic
over time; a comparison between newspapers can reveal the relative importance
each paper gave to an issue during a particular period. However this research
note concentrates on the broader theoretical and methodological issues involved
in using headlines in research and identifies the linguistic features which are
typical of them. It argues further that headlines are particularly revealing of
the social, cultural and therefore national representations circulating in a
society at a given time.

Our research note addresses :

1. The characteristics which
justify that particular attention be given to headlines in press analysis,
namely:

- the
prominence they acquire through diffusion;

- the
role they play in orienting the interpretation of the reader;

- the
shared cultural context which they evoke.

2. The constitution of a
corpus of press headlines.

3. The typical linguistic
features of newspaper headlines (using examples from our corpus).(2)

4. The identification of
linguistic features relevant to the analysis of national representations:

- designation

- modality

- presupposition

1.Characteristics which justify that particular attention be given to
headlines in press analysis

Diffusion

Headlines reach an audience
considerably wider than those who read the articles, since all those who buy
the paper will glance, if only fleetingly, at the headlines. Moreover their
impact is even wider than on those who actually buy the paper, since headlines
are often glimpsed on public transport, displayed on fliers etc. This is
particularly true of front page headlines, which also of course draw the casual
observer to conclude the importance of a particular issue which has been given
prominence in this way. The impact of headlines on the reader is likely to be
all the stronger because certain linguistic
features of titles make them particularly memorable and effective: impact
is deliberately sought (particularly but not exclusively in the popular press)
through the use of puns, (3) alliteration, the choice of emotive vocabulary and
other rhetorical devices. We will discuss some of these linguistic features in
more detail later.

Perspective

Perspective refers to the
role played by headlines in orienting the reader's interpretation of subsequent
'facts' contained in the article. As Claude Abastado argues (1980: 149)
headlines encapsulate not only the content but the orientation, the perspective
that the readers should bring to their understanding of the article. (4) With
much press news drawn from external news agencies and shared with competitors,
the headline is a newspaper's opportunity to stamp its individuality on what is
otherwise a mass-produced product. (5)
Headlines, as they succeed each other through the newspaper, structure a
particular view of the world by imposing on information a hierarchy of
importance: a hierarchy from top to bottom of the page; according to size of
headlines, font etc; and in order of appearance through the newspaper from
front to back.We add in passing that
this is even more true of section titles, which create
a rigid classificatory system that imposes (highly problematic) distinctions
between kinds of news items. For example, during the period of French testing
the reports in Le Monde were
sometimes shown under the section title 'France' and sometimes under 'International'.The implications of such editorial choices
are not merely conceptual, since section titles often imply a particular
relation to the reader: for example: 'Local news' implies closeness to the
readers and therefore, by implication, closeness to their preoccupations;
'International news' suggests that the issues are at one remove. (6)

Repetition both through
synchronicity (co-occurring headlines within one issue of a newspaper
) and diachronicity (repetition over time) 'trains' the reader to
develop certain expectations and imposes certain connections and interpretations.
Thus anaphoric references relate headlines to previous events and situations, creatingforms of
classification that group under one heading possibly disparate phenomena.
Mouillaud and Tétu (1989: 120) give the example of the use of the rubric 'La
crise', an anaphoric reference to a general socio-economic situation supposedly
previously defined, yet whose exact definition and boundaries are almost
certainly unclear to most readers.(7) A
similar process is at work in the use of terms such as 'ethnic cleansing',
'violence in schools' etc. To speak of the 'proletariat',
or 'la Crise' or in our case 'France' is to presuppose a world where reality corresponds
to the categories used, with their associated ideological and theoretical
frameworks. This creates what Patrick Charaudeau (1997 :
249) calls an 'effet d'amalgame, (8) encouraging the readers to link events in
ways which they might not have done otherwise. In our corpus we find that the
papers frequently group together articles related (sometimes distantly) to the
issue of nuclear testing under one heading, for example on pages headed 'French
nuclear testing: the Fallout'.

Cultural knowledge

Headlines are a particularly
rich source of information about the field of cultural references. This is
because titles 'stand alone' without explanation or definition; they depend on
the reader recognising instantly the field, allusions, issues, cultural
references necessary to identify the content of the articles. (9) They thus
rely on a stock of cultural knowledge, representations and models of reality
that must be assumed to be widespread in the society if the headlines are to
have meaning. Common shorthand in headlines such as references to the 'PM', 'le
Président', 'Canberra', suppose not only a certain minimum of political and
general knowledge, but also help to situate the readers within a national
framework, since they must assume that the 'PM' referred to is their own. We
have explored elsewhere the forms of national identification that are revealed
in headlines. (10)

The recognition by the reader
of various types of puns and plays on words also relies on general and cultural
knowledge. This wordplay is a very typical feature of headlines and is
generally confined to the headlines and found far less often in the body of
articles. It can take several forms :

- A play on double meaning :

Ondes de choc (Libération, 7/09/95)

Testing times leave legacy of bitterness (Australian, 20/06/95)

- References to specific
historical events (the 'phony war' of September 1939-May 1940; Gough Whitlam's
injunction in 1975 to 'maintain the rage') :

Drôle de guerre
dans le Pacifique (Libération, 2/9/95)

Frustrated islanders try to maintain their rage (Australian,
22/6/95)

or to specific cultural items such as the title of a
well-known book (The Grapes of Wrath)
or film (Hiroshima mon amour) :

Winemerchants brace for the grapes of wrath (Australian, 16/6/95)

Mururoa mon amour (Libération,
6/9/95)

These references often involve the reworking of fixed formulae, a process which
Fiala (1989) refers to as'défigement':

Mururoa, son
lagon, ses coqs, son Café de Paris (Libération,
29/30/6)

Les Français, la
bombe et le mimétisme (France-Soir, 5/08/95)

(these
headlines resemble the title of a fable by La Fontaine)

Australie : les
raisons de la colère (Libération, 22/8/95)

Liberty,
fraternity, and not in their backyard (SMH,15/6/95)

Commenting on what he refers
to as PVC, 'palimpsestes verbaux culturels' Robert Gallisson (1995) argues that
such reworkings of linguistic and cultural forms constitute a 'conspiratorial
wink' in the direction of the reader. They help to create and maintain a sense
of shared community and collective identity. (11) More generally it is clear
that this may be true of all the cases in which cultural knowledge specific to
a certain society must be mobilised to aid understanding: successful decoding
proves that the reader is an 'insider'. It is the particular characteristic of
headlines that they rely to a greater extent than the articles themselves on
the reader supplying the missing cultural links.

2.Constitution of the corpus

Analysis of headlines in the
print media poses a number of questions in relation to the constitution of the
corpus, notably :

- over
what period the headlines should be collected;

- the
choice of which newspapers to include : national and regional ? with different socio-economic readerships, political
orientations etc ?

- the
criteria to use in the choice of headlines. A simple keyword
search, involving a list of words such as 'French', 'testing' etc.will not identify
all the relevant articlesandheadlines, precisely because of the
inventiveness of the headline writers.

The decisions become even
more complex when the corpus is to furnish material for comparison between
countries, as in the case of our project. These additional problems include :

-the need to constitute a corpus of similar
size in each country : this may involve gathering headlinesover periods of different lengths : in our
case, there was considerably more press coverage of French testing in the
Australian press, than of Australian reactions in the French press.

- the
need to include newspapers with comparable publics in each country.

Our corpus was constituted of
headlines appearing over a period of one month (Australia) and three months (France) following the announcement of the decision. The
different length of the periods reflected the necessity to constitute
comparable corpora, since there were fewer relevant articles in the French
newspapers. We arrived at a roughly similar number of headlines in each
language: 296 Australian and 346 French - a total of 642.

The French corpus was
constituted from 5 national newspapers published in Paris :Le Monde,
Libération, le Figaro, Le Parisien libéré, France-Soir - which address a
range of publics. The Australian corpus drew on a national newspaper (The Australian) and two published in Sydney: the Sydney
Morning Herald and the Telegraph/Mirror.
The choice of these papers gave us access on the one hand to a range of
political perspectives, and on the other to diverse socio-economic publics.

As to the criteria used in
the identification of relevant headlines, we included all titles heading
separate articles - on front page and internal pages - which addressed the
nuclear testing issue, including those where Australia or France were not
mentioned directly.

3. Typical linguistic
features of newspaper headlines

Previous research into
newspaper headlines has raised the question of whether similar features can be
found in the press of varying cultures and languages; studies have not however
involved headlines from a wide enough range of countries to allow for
conclusions to be drawn. According to Kniffka, quoted in Bell (1989: 189), headline structures appear to be very
regular across languages, but his analysis involved only German and American
English texts.Other studies analyse
headlines from only one country: Allan Bell analyses the 'distinctive
telegraphic syntax' of English newspaper headlines (1989: 185); Ingrid Mardh
offers an exhaustive study of the characteristic features of the headlines of a
range of English newspapers.(12) She
identifies the following linguistic features as typical of headlines in English
newspapers: the omission of articles; theomission of verbs and of auxiliaries (the verb 'to be' for
example);nominalisations; the frequent
use of complex noun phrases in subject position (in theme position); adverbial
headlines, with the omission of both verb and subject (an example from our
corpus: French ?... non merci); the use
of short words ('bid' instead of 'attempt'); the widespread use of puns, word
play and alliteration; the importance of word order, with the most important
items placed first, even, in some cases, a verb; and independent 'wh'
constructions not linked to a main clause (an example from our corpus: Why
the French don't give a damn), a form not found
in standard English.

Mouillaud and Tétu (1989:
125) analysing Le Monde, suggest the
following features as typical of headlines:

a)the suppression of
spatial and particularly temporal markers;

b) the
use of the present tense of verbs (where they are used) as opposed to - or in
place of -any other tenses;

c)the replacement of
verbs by nominalisations;

d) the
suppression of declarative verbs and the disappearance of signs of speech
(quotation marks; personal pronouns). (13)

These studies have helped us
to identify certain recurring linguistic features of the headlines in our
corpus. We are not aiming here, however, to provide an exhaustive account of
the linguistic features of headlines in our corpus, nor to compare French and
English headlines, although our corpus allows for this possibility. Because of
our research into expressions of xenophobia and xenophilia, we have sought
rather to identify those linguistic features of headlines which are of
particular relevance to the study of national
representations.

The term 'national
representations' has been coined as an extension of Serge Moscovici's category:
'social representations'. In a 1973 foreword Moscovici describes social
representations as: '[...] cognitive systems with a logic and language of their
own. [...]They do not represent simply 'opinions about', 'images of' or
'attitudes towards' but 'theories' or 'branches of knowledge' in their own
right, for the discovery and organisation of reality... systems of values,
ideas and practices with a two-fold function: first, to establish an order
which will enable individuals to orient themselves in their material world and
to master it; and secondly, to enable communication to take place among members
of a community by providing them with a code for naming and classifying
unambiguously the various aspects of the world and individual and group
history'. (14)

In a later article Moscovici
(1984) emphasises the role of social representations in constructing the
knowledge systems on which we rely to interpret and react to events. He argues
elsewhere that this 'knowledge' does not resemble the rational, reified
universe of scientific discourse, but is a common-sense, consensual universe,
into which have infiltrated, certainly, fragments of scientific knowledge, but
in popularised and half-understood forms, and mixed with other types of
knowledge.Generated and maintained in
the realm of public discourse, social representations constitute 'a whole
complex of ambiguities and conventions without which social life could not
exist', and 'an implicit stock of images and ideas which are taken for granted
and mutually accepted'. (15) Social
representations, then, 'establish an order', they make the unfamiliar,
familiar, enabling the new and the unknown to be included in a pre-established
category; and they enable communication to take place, communication based on a
shared code.

We use the term 'national
representations' to refer to the knowledge systems that encapsulate knowledge
about other nations and nationalities. The term can apply both to
representations of one's own nation, people and country, and to representations
of other nations.The interrelationship of
these two categories of representation, the contrasts and binary oppositions
that can be created, and the role played by representations of the other in
defining one's own nationality and identity, these are issues which we have
explored elsewhere (Develotte & Rechniewski 2001). In this article we have
given examples of representations of France and the French in the Australian
press, and of Australia and Australians in the French press in order to
illustrate our argument that headlines are a particularly rich source of
information about the national representations circulating in a society. The
advantage of analysing headlines is that they refer to and encapsulate this
'knowledge', for the reasons which we have outlined above: they rely on widely
disseminated cultural knowledge in order to be understood. They thus constitute
a kind of 'shorthand', a simplification and condensation of ideas. They play,
moreover, both a passive and an active role: they depend on and mobilise this
knowledge but also in turn help to disseminate and reinforce it, they create
new associations and networks of meaning. They also seek to exploit
representations for pragmatic effect. To understand how headlines perform this
double role, we will examine some of the linguistic features of headlines that
are particularly relevant to the study of national representations.

4. Specific linguistic
features relevant to the analysis of national representations

- designation

- appraisal

- presupposition

Designation: the processes
of naming

For Bell (1989: 189) following Kniffka, the essential structure
of a headline includes an action and an agent, though as we have seen the agent
may be left unclear. The designation of the agent in a headline, where this
occurs, allows for subtle and not so subtle valorisation or devalorisation
:

Les kangourous
n'ont pas de complexes (France Soir, 3/8/95)

All Blacks et
surfeurs contre les essais (Libération,
10/7/95)

Les anti-froggies
se calment (Libération, 1/7/95)

In all these French examples,
the terms used to describe the Australian reactions are demeaning: one can
hardly take seriously protests emanating from a people better known for their
sport and their strange animals.

In this example, the use of
the first name robs the president of his authority; it is possible, too, that
the name Jacques/Jack is not one that can be taken very seriously in English,
since it recalls expressions such as 'I'm all right Jack'. Moreover the pun on
yellow cake refers, of course, to the phrase supposedly used by
Marie-Antoinette and inscribed in history as symbolic of her regal indifference
to the plight of the poor; here it is mobilised to portray Chirac as an
arrogant monarch indifferent to the opinions of the Australians. Such headlines
only work, we suggest, because Australian readers are ready to interpret
Chirac's actions as an expression of arrogance.

Two other aspects of the
designation process are interesting in relation to the study of national representations : the processes of generalisation and personification.
The examples above illustrate an extremely common procedure: designations such
as 'the French', are used to refer to decisions and
actions in fact taken by the French president, government or its
representatives. This is a form of synecdoche, where the whole represents a
part: in this case 'the French' represent the French political elite.

The nationality adjective can
perform the same function: in the Australian press we find frequent references
to the 'French tests' and the 'French decision'.(16) A
similar process is at work in the use of the nation's name: as Moscovici (1984:
43) points out in a powerful article on social representations, naming a nation
creates a fictitious entity which is almost invariably then personified:

L'Australie
accuse la France de "bluff" (Le Figaro,
5/8/95)

France
is not likely to budge (Australian, 17/6/95)

Moreover the motives and
actions of these fictive entities are then frequently explained by recourse to
ill-defined terms taken from popular psychology such as 'inferiority
complex'.(17) Processes and motivations which may, perhaps, explain actions at
an individual level are thus attributed to countries, to provide explanations
of geopolitical phenomena. A further result of such a procedure may be to
associate all members of a nationality with traits of character or actions
attributed to the objectified national community, and thus to justify general
retaliation: witness the discrimination that took place against French people
in Australia in 1995.

A further feature of
headlines that tends to contribute to this kind of generalisation is the
suppression of spatial and temporal markers, a feature identified by a number
of the theorists already quoted: Mardh, Bell, Mouillaud and Tétu..

Two examples:

Why the French don't
give a damn (SMH,17/6/95)

Les kangourous n'ont pas de complexes (France
Soir, 3/8/95)

illustrate both the use of the present tense and the suppression
of spatial and temporal markers in headlines. These characteristics tend to
place the event in a dehistoricised, static present. It is thus possible to
read these headlines both as a comment on a current situation and as a
description of perennial attitudes. Particular events or reactions are included
in a series or class of events, creating unfounded generalisations. (18) Comments
about the behaviour or attitudes at a particular time are thus transformed into
statements about unchanging characteristics - in this case, about national
characteristics.

Appraisal

It is clear that the
processes of naming are involved in the appraisal of the other nation. But in
addition to the analysis of designation, it is necessary to identify other
forms of appraisal: adjectives, verbs, adverbs which convey the perspective of
the writer.

In the headline: Heavy-handed
Chirac shatters rapport (Australian, 15/6/95) the verb continues and reinforces the allusion to
Chirac as a powerful bully. The structure of the headline, placing the
adjective in thematic position, draws attention to it and gives it added
emphasis. A similar structure is found in: Defiant Chirac rebuffs
Evans [...]' (Australian, 19/6/95).

French examples include: L'Australie
accuse la France
de "bluff" (Figaro, 5/8/95)
where the journalist chooses a verb which places Australia's statement in a negative light. In the headline: Les
anti-froggies se calment (Libération, 1/7/95)
appraisal results from a subtle form of code-switching: the fact that a French
journalist uses a slang, pejorative term: les froggies (frogs), supposedly
current in Australia, to refer to the French, denigrates not the French
but those who have invented the insulting term.

Presupposition

A number of the features of
newspaper headlines that we have discussed can also be seen as examples of
presupposition. Dominique Maingueneau (1996: 67) uses the term ' le préconstruit'
to refer to those elements in discourse which are presupposed, which are
presented as self-evident and unproblematic. The 'préconstruit' is often found
in nominalisations: an example from our corpus: A president runs rings
around world nuclear consensus (title, Letters
page, Australian, 16/6/95) presupposes the existence of a world nuclear
consensus which only Chirac defies.

Maingueneau (1996: 68-69)
identifies two main forms of presupposition: the first is inscribed in the
linguistic structure, the second derives from the
relationship between the énoncé and its context and carries pragmatic
significance.

Linguistic presupposition
:

a. deriving from syntactic structure:

In the headline: Why
the French don't care (SMH, 17/6/95)
the structure of the sentence presupposes that the French don't give care: the
only question to be considered is: why.

Similar examples include: Why
the French insist on attracting world outrage (Australian, 15/6/95)

Dare the French do itagain ? (SMH, 8/7/95): it is presupposed that the French have already done
'it' - but what is 'it' ?the
reader must supply the answer.

Le Pacifique pour tous(Le Monde,
4/07/95) : the reader has to interpret the reference to give to
the pronoun.

Pragmatic presupposition:

This form of the implicit
relates to the action or reaction expected of the reader and derives from the
relation of the énoncé to its context, including the context of the discursive
'rules' which ascribe to certain forms of language, certain pragmatic
functions.

Sending a frigate would maintain the rage (SMH,15/6/95)

The French lepers (Telegraph, 15/6/95)

In the first example, the
fact that information concerning the originator of the idea of 'sending a
frigate' is suppressed transforms the headline into an appeal to the reader for
agreement, if not action. The headlineThe
French lepers can be interpreted as a call to
boycott, avoid, or fear the French. It is difficult to draw a clear line
between an informational headline and one which has a pragmatic function since
much depends on the context and the readership. Headlines such as Boycott
could help turn deficit round (SMH, 15/6/95) can be taken as simply
informational, or can be seen as adding to pressure for such a boycott,
presented implicitly as a patriotic and commercially sound act.

It is of course possible -
indeed common -to
find a number of forms of implicature in the same headline, as the following
example illustrates:

The headline
:French arrogance explosive(Telegraph, 15/6/95) implies:

- that all French are
arrogant, a presupposition that it is not necessary to argue because such a
representation of the French will be 'recognised' as familiar and valid by an
Australian readership;

- that
French arrogance explains the decision to restart tests: the title supposes an
explanatory link between a character trait and the decision to resume testing;

- that
French arrogance is dangerous: the headline could imply a warning.

The power of all forms of
implicature and presupposition derives from the fact that they remove what is
presupposed or implied from direct contestation. A discursive 'sleight of hand'
slips the presupposition as an established fact under the guard of the
co-énonciateur. Presuppositions reveal what is likely to go unchallenged: the
stock of national representations circulating in a society. The advantage of
working on a corpus of French and Australian newspaper headlines is that it
enables the researchers to suspend the 'complicity' which normally binds the
reader to the national perspective implicit in the media. It is not easy to
gain such distance, since, as Billig (1995: 12) argues, 'nationalism has seeped
into the corners of our consciousness; it is present in the very words which we
might try to use for analysis'. A comparative study of the two constituent
parts of the corpus, belonging to different national traditions, encourages the
questioning of the classifications and categorisations of the world which may
appear self-evident to the nationals of each country.

The headlines in our corpus
offer a powerful insight into the national representations circulating at a
period of crisis in Franco-Australian relations: crises, Moscovici (1984: 54)
argues, are particularly revelatory: 'the character of social representations
is revealed especially in times of crisis and upheaval ... collective memories
are stirred ... the divisions between social representations appear unadorned,
private and public worlds become blurred.' In the case of the corpus of French
newspaper headlines we find constant associations of Australians with the sea,
with surfers, fauna ('kangourous') and sport. The representations are rather
impoverished: little knowledge about Australia can apparently be assumed on the part of the French
reader. In the case of the Australian corpus the network of representations of
the French is richer and more complex. We find references that relate to French
history: Bastille Day or Marie-Antoinette's apocryphal: 'Let them eat cake';
and more contemporary references, which are, moreover, often evocative of past
conflicts: Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace, Muroroa. The
occasional use of a few words of French in headlines ('non',
'merci') indicates a supposed familiarity with the language. Other headlines
rely on representations of France associated with wine, cuisine or love: [...] France's
lust for la bombe (Australian, 17/7/95).
The range of references and their link with lifestyle and culture, the
knowledge of history and language (however rudimentary) which is supposed, all
these reflect the important role which France has traditionally played in the
Australian imagination as 'the familiar foreign'. (19) These largely positive
associations are, however, tempered by a network of representations around the
themes of arrogance, portraying the French as characterised by self-interest,
indifference to the feelings and opinions of others, defiance and intransigence.

Importantly, such
representations provide the building material for the framework of argument,
opinion and explanation that are constructed by the press around the events, as
the headline 'French arrogance explosive' illustrates. We see at work in the
headlines an extension of networks of representations, a reformatting of mental
models, as new events are 'connected up' to existing representations in a
process which Moscovici (1984: 27) describes as one of the essential functions
of social representations: making the unfamiliar, familiar: through the process
of anchoring: 'a process which draws
something foreign and disturbing that intrigues us into our particular system
of categories and compares it to the paradigm of a category which we think to
be suitable'(1984: 29). Thus phenomena from daily life are assigned to
pre-established sets and sub-sets, are compared to paradigms and prototypes
(the latter often in the form of exemplary members of the group, or ideal
types), in order to make the world in which we live meaningful, so that we can
function within it and satisfy physical, psychological and social needs.

As we argued earlier,
headlines draw at least part of their power and meaning from the pool of shared
cultural, political and general knowledge on which they draw. Not only can they
intrigue and awaken interest, they 'reward' the reader through the intellectual
satisfaction gained in successfully decoding them. (20) They also reinforce the
sense of belonging to a community, both through the references to one's own
society and nation, and through stereotypical representations of other nations
and peoples. The comparison of national characteristics is often held to be one
of the constitutive factors in the development and maintenance of national
consciousness;if
the press provides one of the most powerful vehicles for such comparison in
modern society, it could be argued that headlines -because of their diffusion and visual and
linguistic impact - play a key role in maintaining the constant presence of
these representationsin our daily
lives.

Footnotes

(1) A
number of articles relating to this project can be found in the December 2000
issue of Mots, no 64.

(2)Headlines
are shown throughout the article in smaller type.

(3)
According to Pierre Fiala the use of puns has become widespread in media
discourse, and particularly in headlines and subtitles.Fiala,
Pierre and Habert, Benoît (1989) 'La langue de bois en éclat: les défigements
dans les titres de la presse quotidienne française', Mots no 21, December, p. 83.

(16)
There are few examples of the use of 'The Australians' in the French corpus,
reflecting in part the different roles played by the two countries during the
crisis.

(17)In an article by Greg Sheridan published in The Australian, 15th June 1995, 'Why the French seek to provoke
world outrage', Sheridan proposes an explanation of Chirac's decision by
portraying France as an attention-seeking'hooligan':'Now, as nothing more than a troublesome
middle power, the only way France can gain the sort of attention it craves is
through perpetrating acts of outrage.' His article contains a number of
references to the 'strange psyche of the French'.